I found my spanking article.

At nine o'clock the night before the essay is due. Life sucks.

Especially since it turns out I had the reference all along, in a book that was next to my computer. Oh, and that I only have access to the abstract of the article, because New Yorker articles aren't archived before 2001.

For the curious, it's titled 'Unlikely Obsession', by Daphne Merkin (it's an, uh, unfortunate name for a woman writing about sex ...), and was published in the New Yorker, Vol.72, No.2, Feb26-Mar4 1996.

In other news, my dad told me tonight that if I intend to have my children raised by wolves, I'd better get a move on, as while the population of wolves is on the rise now, they'll likely be extinct by the time I start breeding.

I can't quite decide if this is better or worse than my mum's comment that it's really good that I like making Christmas pudding because, you know, as my sister and brothers start to bring new people into the family, I'll have to make a lot of it.

This is why they can never see my high school yearbook in which I'm voted "Most likely to ... be that crazy old lady on the bus with the cats". They'd probably tell me that it's the best outcome I could hope for.

PS - I am head-over-heels in love with this nifty new feature I found in Word, which summarises my work for me and claims to pick out the most important bits. I love that it found the bit where I said 'Oral sex is so last century' and put that right at the top. Although I do sort of wish it had also found the bit where I said 'Bondage is the new oral sex - it's just not that kinky anymore' (find the quote here).

Also, everyone must go read this immediately.